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Shawn Cannon

Hello! I am Shawn Cannon and I have been dabbling in IT related things officially since 1996. I am our Executive Senior Blogger with experience in VMware, Microsoft, EMC storage, Veeam and Dell servers. For the past 3.5 years I have been working with Splunk. I am a VMware vExpert as well as a SplunkTrust member. I lead the Splunk user group in Atlanta. I am a proud father of two grown girls and in my spare time I like to go bowling, fishing and love to read.

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VMworld 2015 Sponsor – Commvault

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Another totally awesome vBrainstorm sponsor for VMworld 2015 is Commvault! Commvault provides VM backup, recovery and cloud management solutions.  Here is a snippet of what these solutions bring to you:

  • VM recovery with live recovery options
  • Backup TO and IN the cloud
  • Custom-fit data protection for every SLA
  • The broadest hardware snapshot management
  • Workload portability across physical, virtual and cloud platforms

And if you did not know it, Gartner has said that Commvault is a leader in the Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances space.. Five Times In-A-Row!

You can find Commvault at VMworld booth 1605.  You can win an Xbox One, earning up to 7 chances to win!  Those are great odds!  Go to their booth and see their software in action!  You can speak to their experts and executives at their booth.  Do a whiteboard session or check out a demo!  Don’t forget about their sessions as well (an Xbox One will be given away at each session!).  Get more information at http://www.commvault.com/vmworld

Look for myself (rolltidega), Roger (rogerlund) and Aaron (virtualroads) around VMworld wearing shirts like shown below.  We can direct you to the Commvault booth if you are not sure where to go. Thank you Commvault for sponsoring us!

Commvault

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DatacenterNewsStorage

VMworld 2015 Sponsor – NexGen Storage

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

A huge shout-out to another vBrainstorm sponsor for VMworld 2015…. NexGen Storage!  Some of you may be asking, who is NexGen Storage?  Well they have been around for some time.  NexGen was acquired by Fusion-io in 2013.  Fusion-io was then acquired by SanDisk in 2014.  The future of NexGen was in question.  Then SanDisk decided to let NexGen go solo and here we are!  I agree with Stephen Foskett in his blog post where he states that having NexGen in the mix is great for competition!  So here is a bit about NexGen from their web site:

NexGen offers the only hybrid flash array with PCIe flash performance and policy-based storage QoS, allowing customers to prioritize application workloads. NexGen ensures the right data is in the right place at the right time, aligning the costs of storing, accessing, and managing data with its business value.

You can find NexGen at VMworld in booth 941.  At the booth you will be able to talk to NexGen customers to see how PCIe and QoS has helped them.  You can also take a turn at the Escape Velocity virtual reality stations.  I don’t know exactly what that is but it sounds pretty awesome!

Look for myself (rolltidega), Roger (rogerlund) and Aaron (virtualroads) around VMworld wearing shirts like you see below.  We can direct you to the NexGen booth if you need help finding it.  Thanks again for sponsoring us NexGen Storage!

nexgenshirt

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DatacenterStorageVMworld

VMworld 2015 Sponsor – SolidFire

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

This is the first post to call out some sponsors of vBrainstorm for VMworld 2015 in San Francisco! Say hello to SolidFire!  If you do not know who SolidFire is… where have you been??  SolidFire is the All-Flash Array for the Next-Generation Data Center!  Their solution delivers the five core elements needed for storage agility in today’s data centers:  Scale-Out, Guaranteed Performance, Automated Management, Data Assurance and Global Efficiencies.  I suggest you make time to visit the SolidFire booth at VMworld, which is booth 929.  What does SolidFire have in store for you at VMworld?  Well I have to mention their main giveaway!  SolidFire is giving away a SolidFire bike!  This thing is a very cool retro looking bike in SolidFire red!  There are many sessions that SolidFire will be in and don’t forget about the SolidFire party at the ThirstyBear!  Check out all the details at http://www.solidfire.com/vmworld.

Thank you SolidFire for sponsoring us!  Look for myself (rolltidega), Roger (rogerlund) and Aaron (virtualroads) in these cool shirts shown below around VMworld.  If you need help finding SolidFire on the show floor we will be happy to help you find them!

solidfire

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vExpertVMworld

How to connect with us at VMworld!

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

VMworld is only a little over 2 weeks away as of this post!  vBrainstorm will have 3 of our bloggers there and we want to make sure you know how to connect up with us.  All of us are active on Twitter so I will list our Twitter accounts below.  I will be doing some live broadcasts on Periscope so follow me there (rolltidega) to make sure you don’t miss out on anything.  Finally look for us in our customized VMworld 2015 polos that are being provided by some sponsors (blog posts forthcoming).  Our Twitter handles and web site will be on the back of each shirt so if you have never met us do not hesitate to come up and say hello!  We want to meet you!  Thanks and we hope to see you there!

Twitter
Shawn Cannon – @rolltidega
Roger Lund – @rogerlund
Aaron Gruber – @virtualroads

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VMworld

Win a full pass to VMworld 2015 – Sponsored by Veeam

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Have you always wanted to attend VMworld but could not afford the conference fee?  I have good news for you!  Veeam is sponsoring a blogger contest for a chance to win a full VMworld conference pass as well as a FastPass to Veeam’s epic party at VMworld!  If you have never attended a Veeam party you have been missing out!  Here is what you have to do for a chance to win.  Leave a comment below telling your best story of why you should win the full conference pass!  It’s that easy!  The winner will be selected and announced by Veeam on July 30.  So what are you waiting for?  Comment away!!

Extra chance:  Also, Veeam will be giving away one more full conference pass to a random user who’ll answer three questions correctly at http://go.veeam.com/play-veeam-trivia.html

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DatacenterStorage

Tegile Systems Named Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Here at vBrainstorm we enjoy reporting news about the vendors in the IT space.  Tegile Systems is one of the Solid State storage vendors that we follow.  A press release was published today naming Tegile as a visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays.  Kudos to you Tegile!  The press release is below.

Tegile Systems Positioned Among the ‘Visionaries’ of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays Acknowledgement from Gartner makes Tegile the only upstart storage company to be in all-flash and general-purpose Magic Quadrants

 

Newark, Calif., June 23, 2015 – Tegile Systems, the leading provider of flash-driven storage arrays for databases, virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays”* report (http://pages.tegile.com/Q3_2015_Report_Gartner_Quadrant_Gartner_Magic_Quadrant_Tegile.html).  Tegile is the only upstart storage company to be named among the Visionaries in this and Gartner’s 2014 “Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays” reports.

 

The Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays represents vendors that sell into the enterprise end-user market with specific branded SSAs.  Each vendor in the Magic Quadrant is evaluated based on its ability to execute (product/service, overall visibility, sales executive/pricing, market responsiveness/record, marketing execution, customer experience and operations) and its completeness of vision (market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering (product) strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation and geographic strategy).

 

Gartner recognized Tegile as a Visionary for the following reasons:

  • A comprehensive portfolio of Intelligent Flash Arrays, which leverages the same hardware, software and management GUIs for all its storage arrays
  • Broad block and file protocol, which makes Tegile one of the few unified SSA offerings
  • Selectable data reduction, and detailed instrumentation and data reduction reporting on a storage pool and LUN level

 

“We are pleased to once again be recognized by Gartner analysts among the ‘Visionaries’ in their well-respected Magic Quadrant reports,” said Rob Commins, vice president of marketing at Tegile.  “Whether it is an all-flash array for Tier-1 workloads or a hybrid array that provides the performance of flash at the price of disk, Tegile has shown time and time again its ability to deliver innovative products that address operationally or financially important end-user problems at a broad scale to warrant our inclusion on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.”

 

Tegile All-Flash Arrays make it easy and affordable to transition to a flash-centric data center. By delivering maximum performance, high density and compelling economics, the T-Series is ideal for latency-sensitive, business-critical workloads such as online transaction processing, real-time analytics, decision support and data warehousing. The T-Series portfolio enables users to start small and scale in capacity as their business grows. Organizations can start with the T3600 or T3700 to deliver a turbo-boost to legacy storage while deferring equipment replacement before moving up to the T3800 when density and capacity requirements grow.

 

About Tegile Systems

Tegile Systems is pioneering a new generation of intelligent flash arrays that balance performance, capacity, features and price for virtual desktop and database applications. With Tegile’s line of all-flash and hybrid storage arrays, the company is redefining the traditional approach to storage by providing a family of arrays that accelerate business critical enterprise applications and allow customers to significantly consolidate mixed workloads in virtualized environments.

Tegile’s patented IntelliFlash™ technology accelerates performance and enables inline deduplication and compression of data so each array has a usable capacity far greater than its raw capacity. Tegile’s award-winning solutions enable customers to better address the requirements of virtualization, virtual desktop integration and database integration than any other offerings. Featuring both NAS and SAN connectivity, Tegile arrays are easy-to-use, fully redundant and highly scalable. They come complete with built-in snapshot, remote-replication, near-instant recovery, onsite or offsite failover, and VM-aware features. Additional information is available at www.tegile.com. Follow Tegile on Twitter @tegile.

 

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VirtualizationVMwareVMworld

vBrainstorm will be at VMworld 2015 in San Francisco!

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

VMworld 2015 is right around the corner in San Francisco and vBrainstorm.com will be there as an official blogger of VMworld!  What can you expect?  All the announcements made at the keynotes will be reported and summarized here.  We will be meeting with some of the vendors to report on their products.  These reports will be blog posts as well as videos.  We will also use Periscope for some live video reports so make sure you check us out there.  It should be a great week of virtual goodness and fun so stay tuned!

Shawn Cannon – vBrainstorm Blogger

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DatacenterStorageVirtualizationVMwarevSphere

VMware vSphere 6.0 is now available

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Looks like VMware has made the 6.0 version of their vSphere and related product lines available today.  Here are the links to download.  Note:  These links require a My VMware account that is licensed for these products.

VMware vCloud Suite 6.0 (You can get ESXi 6.0, vCenter Server 6.0, vSphere Replication 6.0, vSphere Data Protection 6.0, vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6.0,  vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 6.0.1 and vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.1 from this link.  Virtual SAN is included with ESXi and vCenter Server downloads)

Short and simple right?

 

This is from the VMware Site.

 

VMware Announces General Availability of vSphere 6

”

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of VMware vSphere 6 along with a slew of other Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) products including VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware Virtual SAN 6, VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes, VMware vCloud Suite 6, and VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6.

vSphere 6 is the latest release of the industry-leading virtualization platform and serves as the foundation of the SDDC. This is the largest ever release of vSphere and is the first major release of the flagship product in over three years.  vSphere 6 is jammed pack with features and innovations that enable users to virtualize any application, including both scale-up and scale-out applications, with confidence. New capabilities include increased scale and performance, breakthrough industry-first availability, storage efficiencies for virtual machines, and simplified management  at scale. For more details on the blockbuster features please refer to the vSphere 6 announcement.

If you are interested in learning more about vSphere 6, there are several options:

“

 

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

HyTrust KeyControl Cryptographic Module Enters Process for FIPS 140-2 Validation

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

For those of you in fields where regulatory requirements are important then this news from HyTrust is for you.  They have entered the process to be validated for FIPS 140-2.  A press release was released yesterday, March 11 2015.  The contents of this press release is below.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–HyTrust Inc., the Cloud Security Automation Company, today announced that the HyTrust KeyControl®Cryptographic Module has entered the validation process for FIPS 140-2 compliance. By adding FIPS 140-2 validation, HyTrust will continue to strengthen support for critical regulatory mandates such as PCI, HIPAA, and FedRAMP, offering a significant competitive advantage in an environment where data security compliance requirements are being updated and enforced across the board.

“The HyTrust engineering team has extensive experience in building FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption systems. We have a deep understanding of the complexities involved in both the security requirements for cryptographic modules and the validation process,” said Hemma Prafullchandra, CTO and senior vice president of Products at HyTrust. “That’s why we can assure our customers that there will be a seamless upgrade path from current HyTrust DataControl deployments to the FIPS-validated version.”

FIPS 140-2 and the validation process involved represent an established standard from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It exists specifically to validate that a cryptographic module creates and handles encryption keys in a secure manner. The validation serves to assure users that the technology has passed rigorous testing by an accredited third-party lab, in accordance with NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program. Since its inception, FIPS 140-2 has been considered the defining benchmark for securely engineered encryption in a range of critical areas, from the defense sector to financial services and other sensitive vertical industries.

HyTrust KeyControl® is a hardened software appliance that can be easily deployed on physical or virtual servers. Working in tandem with the HyTrust DataControl® encryption engine, KeyControl provides automated and centrally managed control over all encryption and key management policies. The Cryptographic Module is a subset of HyTrust KeyControl, representing the core software elements that generate and manage cryptographic keys. HyTrust KeyControl uses the module to generate and protect keys, enabling the rest of the solution to confidently store and distribute those protected keys.

About HyTrust (www.hytrust.com)

Cloud Under Control™.

HyTrust is the Cloud Security Automation Company. Its mission is to secure the next generation datacenter by automating data protection and continuously enforcing security policies for the people and tools that operate private, hybrid and public clouds. HyTrust software helps enterprises increase system availability, reduce the risk of compromise, and ensure compliance to industry standards. With HyTrust, organizations gain the control, visibility and security necessary for a trustworthy cloud.

The Company is backed by strategic investors VMware, Cisco, Intel, In-Q-Tel, Fortinet, and venture capital investors Granite Ventures, Trident Capital,Epic Ventures and Vanedge Capital; its technology and go-to-market partners include VMware; VCE; Symantec; CA; McAfee; Splunk; HP Arcsight;Accuvant; RSA and Intel.

HyTrust; HyTrust, Inc.; HyTrust CloudControl (HTCC); HyTrust DataControl (HTDC); HyTrust DataControl: VM Edition; HyTrust DataControl: Virtual Storage Edition; HyTrust DataControl: AWS Edition; HyTrust KeyControl (HTKC); HyTrust Appliance; HyTrust Appliance Community Edition; HyTrust Cloud Control; HighCloud; HighCloud DSM; HighCloud VMV; HighCloud Key and Policy Server; “Virtualization Under Control”; “Cloud Under Control” and “Virtualization & Cloud Under Control” are all trademarks of HyTrust, Inc. All other names and trademarks are property of their respective firms.

Source for press release:  http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150311005992/en/HyTrust-KeyControl-Cryptographic-Module-Enters-Process-FIPS#.VQGnsivF-KO

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DatacenterStorageVirtualizationVMwarevSphere

Move vSphere Replicated VM files from one datastore to another

by Shawn Cannon
written by Shawn Cannon

Recently at my day job we had some new storage allocated at our recovery site to use for vSphere storage.  I was tasked with decommissioning the old datastores.  The problem is that my replicated VMs resided on the old storage.  Of course I could go into my vSphere replication settings on each VM and just point it to the new datastores and be done with it.  That would have taken quite some time to do since the VMs would have to fully replicate again.  I wanted to find an easy way to copy the replicated VMs from the old datastores to the new datastores.  So I did some Internet searches and found the following blog post:  Copy Files Between Datastores – PowerCLI.   Dan Hayward posted a useful PowerCLI script that he used to copy ISO files from one datastore to another.  I basically adapted this script and changed it to move a VM from an old datastore to another.  I could have scripted it and passed in the variables from a CSV file but I wanted to update the vSphere Replication settings one VM at a time.  So here is what my script looked like:

Connect-VIServer ServerName

#Set’s Old Datastore
$oldds = get-datastore “OldDatastore”

#Set’s New Datastore
$newds = get-datastore “NewDatastore”

#Set’s VM Folder Location
$VMloc = “VMName”

#Map Drives
new-psdrive -Location $oldds -Name olddrive -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root “\”
new-psdrive -Location $newds -Name newdrive -PSProvider VimDatastore -Root “\”
#Copies Files from Old to New
copy-datastoreitem -recurse -force -item olddrive:\$VMloc\$VMloc*.vmdk newdrive:\$VMloc\

Basically the script connects you to your vCenter server, sets the old and new datastore variables, sets the VM Folder name and then does the magic to map the datastores and copy the VMDK files from the old to the new.  Having the VMDK files copied over to the new datastores allowed me to use these as my replication seed for each drive when I reconfigured replication settings for the VM.  I just updated this file for each VM that I needed to copy to the new datastores.

Obviously this could have been automated even more as I had to do this for over 120 VMs but I am not a scripting expert.  I am just thankful for a great blog post from Dan Hayward to help me out!  Thanks Dan!

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